Collected Short Stories (4 page)

All the evening he was in the dumps and sat far out on the waste ground at the back of the house. Annie and Mary came out with sweets in their hands and coaxed him in, assuring him that Auntie Sue was not going to touch him. And sure enough she had a Paris bun for his tea and jam on his bread. Then she stroked his head, kissed him, and packed him off to bed early.

That night the father returned to the nightly ritual of family prayers, which had been upset by the arrival of Suzanne in their midst. All knelt except Auntie Sue, who sat on a low chair with her rosary beads twined round one hand, the other resting on her lap. She closed her eyes as she answered the responses, and when she opened them there was always something to distract her; a new seat needed in Daniel's trousers, a stitch needed in Annie's dress. Then she fell to dreaming as she gazed at Mary's two plaits, tied at the ends with green ribbon – hair like her poor mother, God rest her. And then Annie's one plait with a broken ivory clasp – that's what she'd buy them at Christmas, two nice clasps, and maybe brooches with their names on them. A creak from Daniel's chair brought her mind back with a start, and she asked God to forgive her for such distraction as she turned to her beads again. But when he said solemnly: ‘All now repeat the Heroic Offering after me,' she felt weak, and her heart pounded so loudly she thought they would all hear it.

For Thy greater glory and consolation, O Sacred Heart of Jesus
… God forgive me for telling lies to that saintly man …
For Thy sake to give good example
… and wee Arthur saw me swilling it …
To practise self-denial
… and me with a bottle under a board in the room …
To make reparation to Thee for the sins of intemperance and the conversion of excessive drinkers
… God forgive me, God forgive me for being a hypocrite! I can't repeat the next of it …
I promise to abstain from all intoxicating drinks for life.

She listened to the end of it with tightened lips, afraid to profane the sacred words, and thankful for the way the children almost shouted it. And later she was glad to get into the comforting darkness of her room, where she lay twisting and turning for a long time before sleep came to her.

After that she was cautious and always had a secret drink behind a locked door, and kept bottles under a loose floorboard. It was Arthur she feared: he was always appearing at surprising moments, stalking her, playing at Indians, pretending to himself that she was a squaw on horseback, her iron-ring reminding him of a stirrup. But Annie and Mary were the sensible children! They looked forward to Arthur's bedtime, for with their father at some Sodality meeting they had their Auntie to themselves. They would ply her with questions about her schooldays, and about Armagh and the games she played when she was young. And Auntie sitting on the sofa between them, Annie hugging one arm and Mary the other, would turn to one and then the other, looking down at their anxious eyes as she told them scraps about her life. Before Daniel would come in she would sing for them verse after verse of
Lady Mouse
.

Lady Mouse, are you within?

Hm, hm-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m.

Lady Mouse, are you within?

Yes, kind sir, as she sat and spun,

Hm, hm-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m.

They had it by heart now, and all three hummed the hm-ms that ended each verse. Sometimes the hm-ms would be so prolonged by Annie or Mary till one or other would burst out laughing, and Auntie would hold her sides: ‘I'll be kilt laughing, I'll be kilt.'

She sang for them songs of the countryside, courting songs and songs of Ireland's heroes and Ireland's traitors, and sometimes she gave them riddles and phrases to say quickly: ‘Three grey geese in a green full of grazing, grey were the geese and green was the grazing.' She taught them how to knit and how to crochet, and of a Sunday she would read to them out of her prayer book, and though the print was as big as that in a child's primer, she always followed the words with her finger.

In the long November nights, when the pains would come into her legs she would go off to bed early, and then Annie and Mary would come slipping into the room with a mug of hot tea for her and two big slices of griddle bread. They would light the candle and sit on the edge of the bed. While Annie would be sipping the tea and dipping the bread in it, her eyes would travel round the holy pictures that she had tacked to the wall. ‘I have a quare squad of them around me, and there's none of them like that fella there,' she would say, pointing to a picture of St. Patrick banishing the snakes. ‘A decent fella, a real gentleman, many's a good turn he done me.'

Up through the long winter nights she drank little, and now and again at the family prayers she was on the verge of promising to abstain for life, but something told her she'd never stop it. Christmas came and she taught the children how to make a plum pudding; and she bought them brooches like her own with the words Annie and Mary in silver-white stones, and for Arthur a tram-conductor's cap and a ticket-puncher.

Then one cold winter's day when the snow had fallen and Annie and Mary had gone for messages, Auntie Sue was in the house alone. The coalman hadn't come, and there was only a fistful of cinders for the fire. She felt cold. She closed all the doors, but still there seemed to slice through every crevice in the house a wicked, icy draught. Her teeth chattered and she lifted the wrinkled quilt off her bed and put it round her shoulders, looking miserably through the kitchen window at the white street and the light fading from the sky. Her thin blood craved for a drop of warmth – and not as much as a thimbleful of ‘medicine' in the house to wet her lips or make a nip of punch. Without waiting to talk it over in her mind, she left four shillings on the kitchen table for the coalman, put on her black plush coat and hat, took an umbrella, and out with her.

The hard snow lay deep in the street, yellowed by cart-ruts and blackened by coal-dust. In the sky a few stars were coming out. She put up her umbrella, though the snow wasn't falling. She passed neighbours cleaning their doorways with shovels, and now and again heard the wet, sad sloosh of a brush. A few snowballs thudded on top of her umbrella and she hurried on, her iron-ring cutting circles in the snow. Then Arthur came running up with a snowball in his hand and she blew his nose for him and gave him a penny to buy sweets for himself. She turned the corner on to the main road, saw rags of snow clinging to the wheels of a cart, and the rich glow on a coalman's face as he lit his swinging lamp. The snow slushed in her boot and she shivered.

She went into ‘The Bee Hive' and sat in a snug near the stove. There was dry sawdust on the floor, a smell of new varnish, and a great glow of heat. She'd have a nice drop of punch. She held out her hands to the heat and smiled sweetishly as she heard the tight scringe of a cork coming out of a bottle.

That night the children were long in bed and Auntie Sue had not returned. Daniel was seated on the sofa in the firelight, a pair of his trousers drying on the back of a chair, the children's wet boots in a row on the fender. A quilt of snow fell from the roof into the yard. A knock came to the front door. Daniel lit the gas, and when he opened the door there was Aunt Suzanne hanging between the arms of two men. They linked her into the kitchen and on to the sofa, her skirt and coat dripping wet, her hat feathered with snow. She sang to herself pieces of
Lady Mouse
and began to hum. ‘Three gay grease,' she said. ‘No, that's not it. Poor Auntie Sue can't say, “Thee geese geen …”'

Daniel stood in the middle of the floor staring with rising anger at the miserable woman on the sofa. She looked up at him with half-shut eyes and mumbled: ‘As dacent a man as ever walked in shoe-leather.'

He went into her room and bundled all the things he could find into her band-box. He opened the door and looked up and down the street. A gramophone was playing and a child crying. The snow was falling and drifting quietly on to the window sills and the shut doors. Over the white, silent roofs the cold sky was sprayed with stars. A man with bowed head passed and said: ‘That's a hardy night,' and Daniel heard him knock the snow off his boots and close his door. He came inside. Auntie Sue had leaned back on the sofa, her hands listless, her eyes shut. He took his trousers from the back of the chair, threw an overcoat over the huddled figure, and put out the gas.

In the morning Auntie Sue was leaving, and they all went down on the tram to see her off; Arthur knelt on the seat looking out, and no one chastised him when he pursed his lips against the window. They spoke little. They could find no words to say to each other.

At the station, before getting into the carriage, Aunt Suzanne gave him a penny, and her eyes were wet as she held Annie's and Mary's hands and stroked them lovingly. They couldn't look up at her, but stood awkwardly swaying to and fro. The train slid out and they lifted their arms and waved them wearily, tears filling their eyes. Arthur stood watching the back of the receding train. Then he plucked at Mary's coat. ‘Come, on quick,' he said, but they didn't seem to hear him, and he ran on in front to the chocolate machine with the penny Auntie Sue had given him.

A small flame trembled above the turf on the hearth, shrivelled and disappeared, leaving a cord of smoke ravelling itself in the wide chimney. Old Jamesy Heaney sitting with his hands on his knees, his shoulders drooped forward, waited for the fire to light. At his feet lay his black and white collie, her forepaws in the ashes, a wet nose on the flags. The closed door was slitted with light, and through the nests of cobwebs on the deep window came a blue wintry brightness. It was cold.

The old man prodded the fire with a twig and presently it fluttered into life. He'd made a cup of tea before going to the village and while the tin boiled he'd get ready his eggs. He stood up and hobbled to the dresser. The dog got up too, leaving a damp mark on the stone where her nose had lain. She yawned and sat back on her haunches watching the slow fumbling movements of her master.

He was a small grasshopper of a man, withered and worn, and cold to look at. His clothes were patched and tattered, and round the loose soles of his knobbly boots he had lapped coils of wire which now and again rasped on the stone floor. As he lifted a can from a nail in the wall the dog jumped around him and ran towards the door. Old Jamesy paid no heed to her, and went on wrapping hen-eggs carefully in paper and placing them in the can. He had only seven eggs this evening: the frost must have put the hens off their laying. He'd have another look outside; maybe there'd be one or two more.

An icy wind blew into the cottage as the collie crushed out in front of him, sending panic into the fluttering hens. Jamesy yelled at her in a voice that broke sharp on the lean hollows. He crossed to the hen-shed; it was a rickety place patched with the coloured lids of tin-boxes. Near it was an ash tree trodden bare round the trunk where the hens and goat lay of a hot summer day under the quivering shade from its little leaves. Now it was deserted, a red flannel rag caught on the black twigs, making a leafy sound as the wind strummed the branches. Jamesy shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the frost on the rag and at the misty vapour that smothered the nearby sea; the devil take it for frost, good hot male given to the hens – and no eggs. When he came out from the shed they began clustering at his feet and he whished them away from him

‘It's the last yellow male ye'll get for awhile, me ladies. Content yerselves on the nest or go and scrape and fend for yourselves. Be off now!'

The black tin was spluttering and hissing on the fire when he came inside. He gripped the handle with his coat and snuggled the tin on top of a hot, crushed turf.

Jamesy lived alone and made his own meals. He was the last of the Heaneys left on the island. Sitting now with the mug between bony hands, his grey beard on his chest and his long hair fringing his coat collar, he looked like an ancient prophet. The dog nuzzled under his arm and awakened him from a dream, whereupon he threw the dregs of tea at the back of the fire and lifted his can and stick.

He turned the key in the door, tried the latch a few times, and clattered across to the road. From the first crest on the road he would stop and look back at his cottage. From there he would see the smoke tearing itself from the stump of a chimney; the loose black thatch with the eaves as ragged as an old brush; and the tree near the gable where he himself sat in the cool of a summer's evening enjoying the hush around him and the sleepy stir of the sea. And from these his gaze would slowly turn to the potato patch, black and bare now with withered stalks strewn about.

It filled him with pride to look down at the closed cottage impersonally, as if the house belonged to someone else and he envying the owner as he passed on the road. It was a wild, draughty place surely, but it was far from the villagers with their taunts and jibes; and he loved it, loved every stone of it. And then it was his own; there was sweet comfort in that thought.

Gripping his stick he turned his back reluctantly. His old goat, shrunken with cold, me-eh-eh-ed as she saw him disappear over the hill. Jamesy walked firmly on his heels, knees slightly bent, his stick jabbing the road. The air was keen and blue, long streamers of cloud frozen to the sky, the scattered bushes naked and empty of birds. A frost-fringed stream trickled darkly at the side of the road, and now and then the ice that patched the hoofmarks splintered under Jamesy's stick. He wore no overcoat and as he walked along his shoulder blades knuckled under his jacket. He kept an even pace. Once the dog thudded after a rabbit, and returning licked Jamesy's hand, and trotted proudly in front.

At the top of the graveyard hill he stopped for the second time, his breath gusty and misty in the air. Satisfied that there was no one about he shuffled over to the rusty iron gate of the graveyard and lifted the loop of wire that held it. The dog waited on the road beside the can.

Jamesy didn't go in to pray. He stood a short distance from the gate looking thoughtfully at the wind-streaked grasses, and at the lumpy graves with their small wooden crosses and slabs of rock. There was only one headstone; a large Celtic cross of blue granite, its panelled arms and shaft decorated with an interlacing design. On its thick base in large block letters was the name of one man, McBride; a bachelor like Jamesy himself. With head to the side Jamesy looked at the gravelled grave with its neat plinth and iron-railings, and then up at the huge stone dusted with frost. Everyone in the island referred to it as the McBride monument, and they talked about it from time to time. A sadness chilled Jamesy. It was a lovely grave; a sweet grave, near the road and looking down on the fistful of houses that was the village. But as he walked over to his own naked patch of ground warmer feelings began to stir within him.

Last week he had bought the site from the priest, a piece of ground eight feet by twelve, and he smiled to himself as he recalled the priest's words: ‘It'd take less than that to hold your bones, Jamesy. You'd think you had a big family;' and his own reply: ‘There's nothing' like havin' a roomy place when a body's dead.' Poor Father Brady, little did he know what he wanted it for; little did he know!

As he measured the plot with his stick, grunts of satisfaction came from him, and occasionally he would glance furtively over the low graveyard wall. He stood back, screwing up his watery eyes to the sky where his imagination etched the stone that would mark his own grave. It'd be two feet higher than the McBride stone; he'd see to that.

Out on the road again his mind began to play with the familiar thoughts, and an exultant feeling flamed within him. It would be his stone that the people'd talk about when he'd be gone; and visitors to the island would look at it and read the name, JAMES HEANEY; a great man they'd whisper amongst themselves! He rolled the thought over in his mind, holding on to it. His body quivered as the solid reality of the stone possessed him. And then he stopped dead in the middle of the road, and the dog, ears cocked, looked up at him sideways. Crashing into his mind there came something more than the talk of the people about his headstone; his name was going to live; it would live forever in solid stone.

‘Stone is the only lasting thing in life,' he breathed aloud. ‘It bates all.' He never thought of that before. He held his breath, as if to calm his mind, to allow it to gather the sweet breeze of thought and unfold its joys to him. Stone is lasting: all life ends in death, but stone lives on. It was more lasting than all their children. They needn't chaff him any more about his name dying with neither chick nor child to leave behind him! They needn't mock him any longer! There they were as usual the three of them – Joseph McDonnell, John Joe McQuilkin, and Johnny John Beg. He'd have it out with them this evening.

The three old men were smoking in the lee of a gable, watching the sea break on the shore, and the children playing. They were silent, their jigging feet knocking chips of limewash from the wall. But when Jamesy approached, the children raced off into their houses, and the old men began to talk excitedly amongst themselves. In his pride Jamesy walked past them into the shop.

Quietly he placed his can on the counter and sat down on an empty onion-box. There was a great sense of ease and comfort in the box-cluttered shop, with its fat meal bags, the clock ticking, and a warm smell of baking bread coming from the kitchen. He sat still, drawing a sweet warmth from it, afraid to budge lest the shopkeeper would come at once to serve him; it was like being under a clucking hen, he thought. Presently a chair moved and the clip-clop of feet approached; Jamesy tapped the counter with feigned impatience.

The shrivelled shopkeeper entered, her hands white with flour.

‘That's a sharp evenin', Jamesy,' she greeted.

‘Tis that; we're goin' to have a hard winter, I'm thinkin'.'

She looked over the counter at his face; his eyes were blurred, and the left one had a red, drooped lid, with water dribbling from it, making a streak in his white beard.

‘Your eye's brave and angry lookin' the day,' she sympathised. ‘Why don't you try the boracic; a tuppenny packet would make it as clean as a whistle.'

‘Ach, I'll not bother now, sure it's no trouble to me at all; and in the good weather me eye's as dry as withered seaweed. Anyway the sight'll be soon leavin' me.'

‘Them that talk about dyin' are the longest to live … But here give me your eggs and less of this ould blether.'

She began unwrapping the few eggs; he always changed them for tea, sugar, or bread, and what with his pension coming to him every week, digging his own spuds, and fishing off the rocks, he was able to make a good living.

He delayed in the shop as long as he could, and only when the early dusk began to crush the light from the window did he make to go.

‘The right ould miser,' the shopkeeper said to herself as he stooped out.

He blinked his eyes in the greyish light and joined the old men at the gable; they always spent their evenings arguing about ships that came ashore or about the placenames of their island. John Joe was the patriarch of the company and no one doubted his word. They all noticed something jaunty about Jamesy's step, the shrug of his shoulders, and the cock of his head. John Joe fidgeted and coughed loudly; what had Jamesy in his mind! What was he going to ask them?

‘Comin' along the road I had the queerest thought,' he began slowly. They all held their pipes, waiting. ‘I was thinkin' there's nothin' lastin' in this life except wan thing. D'any of yez know what that is?'

The three men looked perplexed at Jamesy, their slow-moving old brains seeking for an answer. John Joe spat out and tucked the tails of his muffler under his oxters. Jamesy grunted.

‘D'ye know what it is? … I'll tell ye … it's stone that is lasting … Stone! Stone!' and he hammered out the words with his stick.

‘How so?'

Like someone performing an ancient rite he slowly raised his stick; it trembled for a moment on the graveyard, and then slowly turned to Croc-na-Screilean, a small hill gathering a skirt of darkness from the falling night.

‘D'ye see Croc-na-Screilean,' he said, his voice quavering. ‘Is there any change in it since we were childer? It hasn't changed, man, no more than the colour of the sea … why? … Because it's stone. Stone, the only lasting thing on this earth!'

They all stood silent; McDonnell and Johnny John Beg turned puzzled eyes to John Joe. John Joe took the pipe from his lips.

‘'Tisn't the hill that is lasting, but the memories that belong to it,' he said, pointing the shank of his pipe at Jamesy.

‘That's the truth you're sayin',' put in McDonnell.

‘It's the hill that's lasting, because it's stone,' Jamesy stamped back.

John Joe's mind was working quickly.

‘A hill is only a hill if it has no memories; it has no life!' And then in excitement he raised his voice: ‘I declare to God when I look at Croc-na-Screilean ‘tisn't a hill I see at all, but our people – the McDonnells, the McCurdys, the McQuilkins, and the rest – fightin' the invaders in the hollow, and our women and children screamin' and shoutin' at them from the hill. ‘Tis that what the hill means to me.'

‘Aren't all them people dead and gone and the hill's the same', Jamesy answered.

‘They're not dead!' they shouted at him in chorus.

‘Aren't their children's children here still? Aren't we the same stock?' added Johnny John Beg.

‘And where'd we all be if our people hadn't married and made life. Where'd the island be? It'd be a rocky desert, a place for rabbits and wild birds and no one left to talk about Croc-na-Screilean and the stories that belong to it; it'd be only a hill – a dead hill!'

‘And when you're dead yourself, Jamesy, you're dead forever with no child to bear your name.'

They all added taunts about his childless life. He laughed at them.

‘Where will yez all be in a number of years? Yez'll all be dead and rotten and forgotten and Croc-na-Screilean will be there without a change.' His eyes travelled to the graveyard: ‘Stone is lasting! The name of Heaney will last!' With this he left them, his dog jumping up at him, glad to be on the road again.

‘He's daft,' said John Joe, looking after him. ‘Crazy! That's what living alone has done for him. And his slutthery old sod of a house that even a swallow would turn up its nose at.'

Jamesy laughed as he trudged away from them, his mind aflame with the vision of the headstone.

‘Dead!' he said aloud to himself. ‘Dead! Little do they know!'

The blue of the sky was darkening and a few stars were coming out. Behind him the oil-lamps in the village were turning the windows to gold and doors were being shut against the chill air. The road was blackening. The frost had thawed on the scraggy bushes and drops of water had formed on the bleak thorns. His step rang sharp on the road. The goat bleated and came to meet him, rubbing her teeth against his side.